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Items

From Diablo Wiki

Item hunting is the biggest joy in playing the Diablo games for many players. The item system in Diablo III is bigger and better, but it's a refinement on the system used in Diablo II, not a radical change.

The D3 Team has not yet revealed many specifics about items in D3, but we do know a few things at this point, from playing at BlizzCon 2008, and from what the team has said in interviews.

Finding items is nothing if you don't have anywhere to put them, and after numerous redesigns during a lengthy evolution, the near-final[1] Diablo III inventory and paper doll are seen to the right. This image is from August 2010, and the large open space is where the Talisman is displayed. It wasn't shown in August, but was in October 2010 at Blizzcon, where the inventory remained the same.

The current inventory design is a 10x6 grid, with all items taking either 1x1 or 1x2 spaces. Most like items (scrolls, gems, potions) stack up to 10, for greater space savings. This is a much larger inventory than Diablo II offered. It's impossible to compare directly between the games, since D2 items that were 2x1, 2x2, 2x3, and 2x4 are all 1x2 in D3. That said, a typical Diablo II inventory might have held 5 large items (spears, bows, body armor, etc) and six 1x1 objects. The Diablo III inventory can hold those items and still have 44 open spaces, capable of holding, for instance, 20 more large items, plus 4 small ones.

In addition to the huge inventory, Diablo III characters will enjoy a huge stash (dimensions and visuals have not yet been revealed), plus a shared stash[2], which all of the characters on an account have access to. This will make it easy to pass items between your characters, either for use or to mule them.

Picking up items is much the same in Diablo III, with one great improvement. Gold is now picked up automatically; characters need just walk near a stack to grab it. Items are not picked up automatically, since the developers think that choosing what you want to grab is an integral part of the game.[3]

One improvement there is the private drops; each character in a multiplayer game only sees the items drop that they can pick up. No other players sees "your" items, and you do not see theirs, so there will be no more "ninja-looting," where quick players dart in and grab everything before you get a chance.

As a result of that feature, players will actually see a lot fewer items drop in multiplayer games, so there will be less overall ground clutter. You won't see 1/4 the items in a 4-player game, since almost all players will still see an item drop from every boss, but you will see fewer items from regular monsters. This isn't necessarily a bad thing in terms of useful items, since those mostly come from bosses and chests. It just means we'll see less junk, with fewer cracked sashes and many, many fewer potions dropping.

Locating items once they're dropped is easier in Diablo III. Items show a hover tag when they first fall, and while that goes away after a few seconds, it can be brought back by using the Alt key to show the hover tag for every item within visual range. Players can change those default settings, as well as make other modifications to the display and function. Bashiok explained some of these controls in a forum post in July 2011.[4]

We have a few different options you can pick from to display item names while they’re on the ground.

The default option is that names will show for 10 seconds when the item drops, and then the name fades out. You can hit Alt again to show them for another 10 seconds. (Diablo III default)

You can also forgo showing item names automatically when they drop and choose to just use Alt to show item names while it’s held down. (classic functionality)

You can also choose to always show item names, and hold Alt to hide them. (I’m not sure how useful this is, but it’s there)
There’s also an option to make Alt toggle showing item names on/off. (my personal favorite)

We’re also looking to bring back the /nopickup option from Diablo II, but it’s currently a nice-to-have feature and so may not make initial release.

Additionally you can rebind any and all keys in the game, so you can easily make something like the Tab (for example) key show item names instead of Alt, if you prefer.

There will not be an auto-pickup option, or any way to block the display of "junk" items, as the developers feel that pausing to view the gear on the ground, and clicking to pick up the good stuff, is part of the gameplay and skill, and they do not want to automate everything. Nor will they be allowing player-made mods to do this.

Besides the hover tag names on items, the actual items themselves have a glow of the appropriate color, making them more visible, especially in darker dungeons. Rare items glow yellow, magical glow blue, and so on, as seen in the screenshot collage to the right.

Little has been revealed thus far about item buying and selling. The basic interface is similar to what was seen in Diablo II, with the items pictured in a grid in the NPC merchant's inventory; the item graphic is displayed, along with the stats.

It was thought that only Artisans would buy or sell items, but a roaming, minor-quest NPC was seen in the Blizzcon 2010 demo. After the player completed a short quest for his benefit, he offered to buy and sell items, right out in the dungeon. His interface is seen to the right. This quest will differ in the final game from what it was in the Blizzcon demo, but it seems that this is a preview of the sort thing players will see in the game, with portable item sales out in the dungeon for speed and convenience.

Nothing is yet known about the quality of items that will be sold by the NPC merchants. In Diablo and Diablo II it was possible to obtain some very good quality items (even high quality end game gear) from merchants, on the rare occasion that a desired modifier turned up on a good item type. This may or may not be the case in Diablo II; the developers have said that they want a variety of item types to be top items in the game, including set, legendary, rare, and crafted items. Crafted items are made by the Artisan NPCs, but it's not known if items for sale by the Artisans, or other NPCs, will be good enough to use long term, or will just fill gaps in equipment in the short term, for low/mid level characters.

The D3 Team has confirmed that there will be magical, rare, and unique items (now called "legendary") will be found in Diablo III. Set Items were on the fence for a long time, but were finally confirmed as in the game in early 2011, though with some major changes in their types and function. Runewords will not return in Diablo III, as runes are placed in skills, not items.

Crafted items were hinted at for a long time, but not until August 2010 was Diablo III's crafting system and salvage cube revealed, as part of the Artisan NPC operations. Crafted items do not have a special color in Diablo II, as they become categorized as magical, rare, set, or legendary items, depending upon the recipe and the results.

Final item colors were revealed in early 2011, and they show considerable changes from the development process:

Socketed items do not display a special color in Diablo III, since sockets are granted by and treated like item modifiers. In theory any item with sockets would therefore be at least magical, in classification.

Jay Wilson spoke on this issue in Blizzcast #8, in March 2009. [6] His comments on color confirmed various item types, while opening a whole new can of worms on the color scheme.

Jay Wilson: We've kind of gone round and round on color scheme. I know with World of Warcraft when they decided on a color scheme to fit quality, they were taking that from Diablo 2 and other MMOs, but they chose a color set that they felt was easier to read. We actually tried to emulate that for awhile, I think actually our announcement build or maybe our BlizzCon build was actually using a color scheme very similar to World of Warcraft and we generally found we just didn’t like it, it didn’t feel Diablo. So something as simple as that didn’t feel Diablo anymore.

Color scheme is pretty solid right now, it follows very closely to the Diablo 2 color scheme. We slightly shifted some of the hues to help, especially with color blindness, to try and get some of the more problematic combinations. We took out, for example, uniques were gold, we’ve changed their color I think we did purple which is a bit of a nod to World of Warcraft but the problem was gold and yellow were really close. Even though the gold lettering was unique and everything it was often very difficult to tell the two apart. So we just did that not to get away from Diablo but to try and fix that kind of readability issue. What we found is that if we try and get too far from Diablo it doesn't feel right, so right now magic items are blue, rare items are yellow, unique items I think they're purple – I'm operating off memory here but they might be different actually because I think we use purple for something else for an item type we haven’t announced yet. Then if we do set items they'll be green, we haven't made a call on set items yet.

Fans reaction was quite negative to the color change of Uniques. Most fans thought they should stay the traditional, classic gold, and that if something must change color it should be rares, switching to purple or pink or some other color that won't be confused with gold.

What type of items will make up the end game gear is always a popular topic for fan debate. This issue came up in the March 2009 Blizzcast, in a question to Jay Wilson. [7]

Bornakk: Will there be a diverse selection of items that are viable for the end-game or will it follow the WoW-type style where there is more like one end-all-be-all set for each class?

Jay Wilson: It’s definitely diverse and it’s diverse on a lot of different fronts. When you think about Diablo 2, all the different ways you can build your character, we really expanded all the ways you can customize your character by adding in the rune system. Not only can you completely customize your skill set, much more so than you can in game like most MMOs like World of Warcraft, because of that, the items you want are based upon the skill set that you’ve chosen or the type of build that you are trying to create.

And items, one of the things we are trying to do is focus on this even greater element of defining your build. So really it's up to the player on what kind of stats they want on their character, but we're definitely not shooting for a, "oh here's the barbarian armor", there is a set and when you get the full set you're done. That's just not very Diablo and it's not really the kind of gameplay we're going for. If anything we’d like the item set to be a lot more diverse than it was in Diablo 2.

Jay Wilson: We’d like to get a mix. We would like uniques to be valuable for some builds and rares to be valuable for some builds. Ideally, we’d love to look at an in-game character and see a mix of uniques and rares. There are a couple of ways we can accomplish that. One is to look at the constraints of what a rare item could be and create some space for those items to exist that it makes them superior to uniques. Then, look at uniques and give them some specific attributes that are very hard or almost impossible to show up on rares, but then keep those item bases separate. So you go, “This unique item is really awesome for this, but there’s no belt, for example, that goes with it and so I’m going to look for a rare item to fill that slot, whatever it might be.” The other way is to really focus on unique items having a very specific roll and filling a very specific function.

Other D3 developers said much the same thing at Blizzcon 2009. [9] These are all noted so that when the final game arrives, and everyone is wearing nothing but rares, or uniques, or set items for the first six months, you can point to these quotes in the wiki and shake them overhead, like angry villagers with torches, on the heels of Frankenstein's monster.

August 2010 brought a major announcement, as the crafting system and Artisans were introduced. Characters in Diablo III will spend much of their time breaking down unwanted items in the salvage cube, then using the raw materials created by that process to craft new items from the recipes offered by the various artisans.

There are three artisans, each offering a wide variety of types of items, as well as crafting recipes and other item-related services. The Artisans will also give quests and information, and they travel with the player from act to act, providing the same "town" (called the Caravan) throughout the game.

Click the various linked words in this section for much more info about everything related to the Artisans.

One added feature sure to please players is the item buyback option. Anything you sell to the NPC merchants can be bought back. This isn't something players will use often, or on purpose, but that one time you misclick and accidentally sell something you wanted to keep, the buyback will be a blessing.

There does not seem to be any un-salvage option though, so be careful what you stick into the salvage cube.

During most of the development process there was no durability in Diablo III. The development team said they might do without it; that it was a needless inconvenience. Their thinking changed at some point, since as of the Artisan reveal in August 2010, durability was back in the game and a major factor in item values. Durability was also said to be the only real death penalty, with a loss of it leading to heavy repair costs upon each death.

Another key question about items and item components in Diablo 3: just how scarce will they be? Diablo 2 did a fairly good job making the top items hard-but-not-impossible to find, until Runes were added in D2X and blew the curve, with the higher level runes incredibly rare; far too scarce given their enormous utility in Runewords.

Though we won't have an answer to this until much later in the development process, at least in theory, we will not see useful items with such astronomical drop odds in Diablo 3. [10]

GamePlanet: So we're still going to see the same level of rarity - like with the Zod Rune that nobody ever really picks up?

Kevin Martens: That's yet to be determined. I'm not exactly sure if we're going to make it a little less rare or not. Hard to say yet, we'll keep tweaking the numbers and we'll have to do a lot of testing to find out if we're happy with things. Even if we do change it in one direction or the other, we may change it back as we're testing it.

A few new item types have been seen so far. Characters now wear shoulder pads and pants, in addition to all the other types of armor found in Diablo II. See the paper doll for screenshots and details.

The Monk is known to use various "fist" type weapons, reminiscent of the Diablo 2 Assassin's claws. It also appears that the Monk's melee staves may be a new variety of staff, with their thicker, studded hitting ends. The Wizard-only short staves (which can be dual wielded with an orb in the off-hand) are a separate type of item in Diablo 3; not just the lowest level type of staff.

Other than those, no new weapons have been seen thus far.

There are many changes to small items. Charms, runes, and jewels appear to be gone, but there are many more types of gems. Another new item are the skill runes, which are socketed into active skills and add bonus effects of various types. These items can not be used in items and provide no benefit except when socketed into a skill.

Bags of holding can also be found, which add additional inventory slots when equipped in special bag slots. (This feature may or may not last into the final game. Inventory space issues have changed repeatedly during development.)

If there are other new item types, new varieties of weapons or multiple levels of jewelry, it's not been announced. However, lots of the item types so popular in Diablo II were not added until the expansion; there were no jewels, charms, runes, or runewords in regulation Diablo II; those all came in the expansion pack. It is therefore conceivable that a similar amount of item types and/or varieties could be added by the team in D3 and its expansion(s).

Jay Wilson (sort of) confirmed that we would see new item types in an October 2009 interview. [11]

Diii.net: Are there going to be any completely new item types?

Jay Wilson: Will there be any completely new item types?... Yes. *laughs* That’s all I’m going to say.

Diii.net: Does that mean the Monk’s fist items? Or something else.

Jay Wilson: *pauses* That’s all I’m going to say. You asked the question. “Are there going to be any new item types?” That’s all I’m going to say.

There are a lot of class-specific weapons in Diablo 3. There are more types of items than in Diablo 2, but a lot of them are limited to one character type, or exclude some character types. Full details have not yet been determined, but the general theory is that characters can only use items that they would normally be able to use. Barbarians can't use magical items, mage characters can't use axes, and so forth.

Which characters can use, or not use, which types of items has changed repeatedly during development. See the Class-Specific Weapons page for an up-to-the-minute tally, with extensive developer quotes.

Bashiok spoke on this issue, from a design standpoint, in July 2009.[12]

...we do now have some restrictions on weapon types usable by each class. It’s been part of the game for a while now. Allowing every class to use every weapon type was actually going to require a huge amount of time and effort and it would have meant cutting out or cutting into other features. We evaluated really how often people would want to have their class holding a weapon type that (traditionally) contradicted their class-style versus that work going in to other features - specifically having a lot more skills and a lot more skill-rune effects. We made the obvious choice which is making sure there are a ton of awesome skills and rune effects to choose from.

Because I can see the conclusions being jumped to RIGHT NOW in my old cranium - let me state that weapon types do not dictate stats. At least not wholly (barbarians can’t use staves so there’s no point in allowing fury related stats on them). We understand that the game is about variation, customization, and experimentation in class builds. We’re not World of Warcraft, we’re not looking to make weapon stats “optimal” for the types and classes that will use them. Which is to say, we’re not going to put specific stats in specific amounts on each weapon of a specific type because we’re making assumptions about what each class wants out of their stats. We want variation, and experimentation, and all that good stuff. These restrictions don’t affect those goals, it really just means you probably won’t see a wizard lugging around a two-handed axe. Kind of a bummer, but then think about what it affords us to work on with more and better looking skills, a more robust rune-skill system, etc. We want to spend our time and effort on what makes sense to making the game better.

Blizzard has also stressed that the selections are made carefully and distinctly, and that the lists are not yet finalized.[13]

The list of what weapon types are or aren’t allowed for each class aren’t final and could change. They’re fairly logical choices and what is most commonly seen as closely tied to the hero archetypes. In our current game the wizard can’t wield a two-handed sword for instance, but can still use a one handed sword and shield if so desired.

Proving their point, this has since been changed and Wizards can now use two-handed swords.

It's not known if there are similar limits to armor, but if so none have yet been seen, and the D3 Team has stressed that all characters will be able to wear heavy plate as well as light armor. [14]

There still aren’t any armor restriction planned. Armor is a different issue as it’s shown in much the same way as Diablo II, so more types don’t actually increase the animation/modeling costs like weapon types would.

The Diablo 2 Expansion added class-specific armors; helms that only the Druid and Barbarian could wear, as well as shields that were Paladin only. Unlike the class-specific weapons added in the expansion, the armors were cosmetic and fairly illogical; there were plenty of other helms and shields in the game, and it's not like there was something special about the shape of the Druid's or Barbarian's head.

Shields are generally considered armor, even though they are equipped in the off-hand weapon slot. Shields will be a useful item in Diablo III, but far less useful (overpowered) than they were in Diablo II. In D3, shields work like the "absorb" property on magical items; they absorb some set amount of damage from incoming attacks, with the amount varying by the type of shield, the shield's magical properties, and other factors. This means that a small shield will only absorb something like 4-6 damage, so if your character takes a hit of 50 damage, the shield will hardly help you at all.

This is very different than the Diablo 2 system, where any successful block absorbed 100% of the physical damage of the hit. Most characters in Diablo 2 used shields since the ability to completely block up to 75% (or more with a Paladin) of incoming physical damage was enormously useful. Much more useful than the added damage from using a two-handed weapon. Without shields working so fantastically in Diablo 3, two-handed weapons should be a much more viable option.

Gear sets are not Item Sets, i.e. the green-named collections of matching items with the same name and complimentary bonuses.

Gear sets is a term the Diablo III developers use for a matched outfit, with all the items of the same general quality level. There are 18 such gear sets in Diablo III, all of which look very different on each class. Blizzcon 2010's "Crafting Sanctuary" panel provided the example as seen on the right. See the Gear sets page for full details.

The items in Diablo 3 will not "bind on pickup" (BoP). In other words, there won't be any items that are untradable, and that can not be dropped by a character without destroying them. The D3 Team feels that item trading and twinking is an indispensable part of the Diablo play experience, and they want to encourage trading.

That said, they are considering making the very highest end items Bind on Equip (BoE). That means that once such an item is equipped it can not be traded to or used by any other character. The point of this feature is to create some turn over amongst the end game gear. If the best items can be passed around and reused, then players will just use the same item on all of their characters, and eventually the trading market becomes clogged with the item as more and more of them are found and none are ever removed from the economy. (This is less of an issue with Hardcore characters, since there items are removed from the economy with unlooted character deaths.)

The D3 Team has said that BoE items might be bind to account, rather than to character. (It's not yet been determined.) This would let players transfer them between characters on the same account. It's unclear how useful this would be; from what we've seen of the character design thus far, items are fairly exclusive, either by class-specific type or just by only being useful for one of the classes, so it's unlikely that a player would have more than one character who could or would want to use a given high level weapon anyway. But with BoE:Account, it would at least be useful to pass around a super item between characters of the same class, with different builds. [17]

Jay Wilson: We have no “Soulbound” or bind-on-pickup, except for quest items. We do have bind-on-equip for the highest end items in the game. We targeted, roughly, any item above level 85. These we will do as bind-on-equip. The reason for this is that we want people to be able to trade them, but we also want to remove the high-end items from the economy. One of the greatest ways that you can do that is with bind-on-equip. What we don’t want is to have a situation where you find something on the ground like, “Oh, man. This would be a perfect weapon for my Monk. Oh, but I just picked it up and now it’s on the wrong character.” We don’t want that at all.

Most of our focus on Diablo 3 is as a trading game. So, if you take trading out of the item space, you ruin the core of the game. Finding a really great item that is not for you is still a great event because it means you have a bartering tool to get the item that you do want. We definitely want to make sure that that still exists.

There's been a fair amount of confusion about how Quest Items will bind on pickup, after Bashiok gave several unclear explanations of the feature in a series of forum posts. [18]

This is not a big deal; characters in Diablo 3 have a Quest Items tab in their inventory menu. Only quest items are stored in that window, they are automatically slotted there when picked up or received from an NPC, and they are automatically removed/used when required by the quest. The point in making them BoP is that a clueless new player might drop or throw away a quest item which would make that quest unfinishable.

Quest items can be removed, permanently, by abandoning quests. When a quest is dropped in that way, the items associated with it will vanish from the inventory window.

The Diablo III inventory system has been overhauled repeatedly during the development process. It changed a great deal between the game's debut in June 2008, and the Blizzcon build in October 2008. Many more changes were noted in screenshots released in March 2009, and more changes can be expected before the final game.

There are item sockets in Diablo III. Runewords are not returning, but magical and rare and unique (and other yet-unannounced item types?) will have sockets.

Not much is yet known about what can be put into sockets; gems of various types have been seen in the gameplay movies and in the BlizzCon 2008 demos, but their bonus properties are unknown. No jewels have been seen, and runes in Diablo III are for socketing into skills, not items. There may be (and probably are) other things to put into item sockets, but no info has been released about them.

The CaravanBlacksmith, is an Artisan that can add sockets to shields, helms, bracers, belts and pants, but not weapons, rings, amulets or pauldrons. However, these latter items may be accessible through the blacksmith's later upgrades. The upgrade is hugely expensive compared to crafting a new item, and can be done multiple times. It does not increase their sell value but does seem to alter the appearance of the item.

We haven't released any information on our site, but it was possible to collect socketed items as well as gems in the BlizzCon demo... The gem stats at this point are more or less just the basics yanked from Diablo II to get the system running and have something to play around with.

One major change to items is that players only see items drop that are theirs, and theirs alone. No more of the "ninja looting" of D2, where everything that dropped was first come, first served. This results in more total items dropping, since bosses drop an item or two for every character in the area, but each character only sees their items. If that boss dropped four items in a four player game, each player would only see their item. Trading or giving items away is easy; simply pick them and then drop them. Once a character drops an item any other player can see it and may pick it up.

Jay: I believe I mentioned in the past that we are considering crafting systems. But we're not really announcing anything about that right now. But we took a few things out, like Rune Words, essentially because Rune Words is a very simple crafting system, and we're planning to do something different there. I'd say that most of the changes are minor. We've made lots of statistical changes. For example, with the more magical classes, like the Sorceress, their items were in some ways less valuable to them because they didn't have a lot of effect on their damage output, so we've added more attributes that control magic damage and things that allow Wizards to get items that do more damage and bolster their defenses and health. We have more [weapon name] affixes that play into the broader set of resources; the Barbarian has fury, so we added affixes that play with that. We generally tried to expand our approach to affixes to make them smarter.

Those are fairly simple, though. There are other things, like how we've changed the way that gems work. In Diablo 2, gems could only go on white -- or nonmagic -- items, while gems are now a separate chance for a weapon, meaning that we roll the item's base attributes, and we roll for its chance to have gem slots. So now any item, even legendary ones, can have gem slots. That plays a lot into the core of the item system [...] even if you find the best item in the game, the stats on that item have some randomness to them that means there could be a better version of that item. Well, now, if you find the best item in the game but it doesn't have any gem sockets, then it's not the best version of that item. In terms of creating item variance, we're looking to enhance that within Diablo 3.

There're still a few things that we haven't made decisions on yet -- set items, for one. I didn't like the way they worked in Diablo 2, as by the time you finally got a set together, you generally leveled beyond the use for it. So you might save them for alts, which is OK, but I'd rather that they be useful for you to begin with. We haven't really decided how we're going to fix that. We also have some new item types that we haven't announced yet that are related to some systems that we're planning. But I don't think they vastly change the system -- they mostly play into the strengths of it.

Jay's comments on "gems" are a little confusing, since he seems to be using "gems" as a synonym for "sockets" in the whole answer. Apparently the only things to socket in D3 will be gems, rather than gems, jewels, and runes as in D2?

None of the many Diablo III previews have spent much time on items, or given us any specific details about them, yet. The most detailed commentary on items so far came from Flux's Wizard gameplay report, written after his BlizzCon experience:

All the low level armor was equivalent to what we’re all familiar with from D2. Blue (magical) gear with minor bonuses to attributes, mana, life, and so forth. I never saw any jewelry in the Blizzcon build (not enabled or the monsters weren’t high enough level to drop it), and since I wasn’t taking many hits (or at least trying not to) with my wizard, I wasn’t much worried about defense or defensive bonuses on armor.

I did find a few nifty wands and other light weapons, with useful mods. As was the case with my Witch Doctor, I found weapons with +% damage (around 11%) and +% experience gain (7 or 8%). Those didn’t greatly change the gameplay, but I did notice the improved damage, once I had it. Eventually (D2 style) my Wizard transitioned to magic find equipment, and while the % I had from boots, shield, and chest armor with MF on it wasn’t more than about 40%, it did seem to increase the number of rares I found. Not greatly, and not to my benefit, since I kept wearing the magic items I had found earlier, but it was fun to see more shinies drop.

I didn’t find any uniques with the Wizard, nor any of the crystal ball-looking items she uses in the BlizzCon gameplay and most of her screenshots; I assume those are a higher level item type. I ended up using odd weapons; wands and clubs and short swords and the like, based entirely on their magical bonuses. And they served well enough.

This is a compilation of what mods you can search for in the Auction House within the Game. This information does not include the mods that can be sometimes found on Set or Legendary Pieces. Also, Please note that some item modifications require a class specific item in order to obtain the mod. Considering that only that class should be looking for that modification I did not see the necessity of making this distinction.